


The Delphini Trials

by 8611



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, M/M, lack of happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-22
Updated: 2012-11-22
Packaged: 2017-11-19 06:29:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/570230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8611/pseuds/8611
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is how dreamtech goes public, how people are broken. This is how Eames ends up on top of a burning car in Paris and Arthur dies at 7:32 on October 30th.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Delphini Trials

**Author's Note:**

> As I'm writing new stuff I'm going to be posting some of my old stuff as well, so here's the first bit! I'm posting another A/E in a second and then I'll go forward from that. (The fashion/city!verse will probably go up at some point, don't worry.)

(Eames stands on a car, head shaved down to stubble, ripped jeans, junky sneakers, and a leather bomber jacket that was Arthur’s, and slams a foot through the windshield. A kid with a Molotov throws it through the destroyed glass, laughing, and Eames waits for the flames to really kick, right up until some asshole Gendarmerie hauls him off the roof.)

\---

Marcus Delphini is not what Phillipa was expecting. She’s in a café in New York, watching the news on a TV screen up on the wall. It’s a weird little place, they serve nachos and BLTs and falafel, and the biggest TV is always showing soccer. It’s far enough towards the Hudson that it’s fashionable, but just a little too far north, a little too into the 40’s to really be that posh. It’s glitzy, sure, but not classic. 

Phillipa likes it. 

Delphini says something about mind crime, about being helpless with no way out and no way to fix it, and Phillipa looks back at the screen, chewing on the straw of her Sprite. 

“They are criminals, more than. Worse.” Delphini is balding, Phillipa notices. Wondering how old he is, she looks him up on her phone – _Born Marco Delfini, CEO of telecommunications giant Delphi Technologies. 1970._ He’s 54. Certainly more than old enough to be losing the amount of hair that he is. 

Phillipa’s not a fan of Delphini. Yesterday the list of the “criminals” (no, she can’t think of them like that) was released to the news, those that would be put on trial. Some had gotten out through money, some through the insanity plea, some just vanished. She recognized names on the list immediately. 

Her father wasn’t on it, he’d just be spending the rest of his life in an institution. James was beside himself, Phillipa thought it odd that he was being so stupid about the situation. Their father wasn’t going to be put down like a broken horse, didn’t have to vanish, and would be fully accessible for the rest of his natural life. It makes sense. 

She hasn’t been able to get worked up about Dom in a long time.

They start listing the names off on the news again – it’s become a sensation, the whole world wrapped up in this idea of mind crime, and it’s going to the international courts. Everyone wants to know who the witch hunt turned up, brought out of the wood work. Now that dreamtech has gone mainstream no one’s really safe.

_Ariadne Dennis_. Phillipa can see that one going either way. Ariadne only worked three jobs of course, but two of them were inception. She won’t be killed, but she’ll be spending time in prison. 

There are other names, people who came in and out of Dom’s life, of Arthur’s and Eames’. She makes a game of it, guessing what sentence will be handed down to them. 

_Nash Singer._

_Yusuf Omidi._

_Arthur Gordon._

Arthur. Arthur Arthur Arthur. 

He raised her, in a way. She loves Arthur, like she can’t bring herself to love James (he’s weak) or Dom (he’s detached). Arthur is what she’d like to be when she grows up. She sits back against the window and presses her cheek to the glass, pressing her lips together and willing herself not to cry. She knows that Arthur’s only going end up one place. 

She hates Eames for just vanishing, for disappearing into thin air because he can, because that’s who he is. He has no lasting allegiances, no lasting anything. 

She hates Eames because he didn’t bring Arthur with him. 

\---

(“Game’s up,” Eames says weakly when Arthur gets in that night, sitting slumped on the balcony, cigarette dangling from his lips, his eyes dead in the low light. “Delphini’s going to trial.” 

Arthur doesn’t say anything, he just stands in the door and stares down at Eames, wondering when the last time he slept was. 

“You know, they’re saying that your lot is going to get it the worst.” Eames looks up at Arthur, takes his cigarette and stubs the ash that’s just been burning and burning and burning against the tile of the balcony. 

“It’s not like this is a shock,” Arthur says finally, because, yeah, he always knew in a way. Knew that his life was going to end violently and badly. He joined the Army when he was 18, by 24 he was destroying people’s minds. There’s no other way for him to go.

“Come with me?” Eames asks, and Arthur shakes his head. “C’mon Arthur, don’t be like this, god. I can get us hidden no problem, we can run, we’ve done it before, it’ll all be alright.” 

“It’s never been this bad.” 

“It’ll turn out alright.”

“I can’t run for the rest of my life Eames, I can’t just change who I am every two months, get up and move and do it all over again to stay out of someone’s sights.” 

“What are you going to do?” Arthur doesn’t know, and disturbingly, he can’t find the effort to want to know. 

Arthur shrugs, and bends down to where Eames is, letting Eames’ tip forward and grab his face, kissing him like he’s drying, like Arthur’s dying, and maybe they both are. The clock’s started counting down, finally. And Arthur – Arthur’s relieved. There’s something peaceful about knowing when exactly your life will end. 

“Please,” Eames says when they break apart, and he sounds like destruction. 

“I won’t run,” Arthur whispers. 

Eames kisses him again, making a horrible sound at the back of his throat, and Arthur realizes that this is goodbye.)

\---

Roger takes her out to coffee the next day, because he says he’s worried about her. 

“I’m fine,” Phillipa says, even though she’s not. She’s not very good with her own emotions, and she’s always been fine with pushing them down into one tiny little corner, cool and controlled and fearless, and it’s worked. 

“You – look. I have to ask. With all this going on, all the Delphini stuff. Are you related to Cobb?” Roger is dumping way too much sugar and milk into his coffee, he’s from out here, up in Boston, and he doesn’t understand coffee. Phillipa was raised by yuppies on the West Coast, she understands that coffee is never just coffee. 

“He’s my dad,” Phillipa says, and shrugs when Roger goes very still, just staring at her. “It’s honestly not a big deal, he’s not going to jail or anything. It’s not going to be that hard to get him declared criminally insane.” 

“Your dad?” Roger knows about dream tech, quite a bit, actually. He’s been under, he knows his way around a PASIV. He knows who Dom Cobb is. One of their professors had introduced – or, in Phillipa’s case, reintroduced – them to the technology the previous year. “Your dad is the guy who preformed inception first.” 

Phillipa just shrugs again, and holds her mug between her hands, letting the warmth seep into her palms. It’s the end of February, and winter has officially overstayed it’s welcome. 

They sit in silence for a long time, before Roger reaches over and brushes a strand of Phillipa’s hair out of her face. 

“My mother died because of dream tech,” Phillipa says suddenly. “So you think I’d understand – but. I don’t. I can’t. They’re just not bad people.”

Roger looks at her oddly for a while after that. 

\---

(Arthur is reading when they smash through the door. He’s actually surprised they found him that fast, but when cool metal closes over his wrists he just sighs, because, finally, he knows where his life is going again. These past few weeks have been hell, not knowing if and when they’d come for him. 

The back of the squad car smells like old shoes and wet dog. He thinks, with a tiny twitch of a smile, that it’s something Eames would have loved to complain about.)

\---

(They only hold him overnight, and then kick him out, telling him to get to the hospital if he feels like it. There’s still rioting going on in the streets, there will be for a while. 

Eames walks until he finds a bench to sag down onto at a broken bus stop and just puts his head in his hands, feeling almost ill, but not quite. He remember once, years ago, being drunk in Mombasa and sitting against someone’s house, drunk texting Arthur with some glee. His fingers itch for his phone, but he doesn’t have one anymore.

His fingers itch for Arthur, but he doesn’t have that anymore either.)

\---

Phillipa is pre law because it’s something that just makes sense. Her classes still frustrate her, though. 

“The Delphini Trials are our generation’s Nuremburg,” a boy at the front of the class says. 

“Nuremburg is a place,” Phillipa says, staring down at the doodling she’s doing in her notebook. “Marcus Delphini is a person. You can’t blame a place for destroying people’s lives like you can a person.” 

The class turns to her, and she looks up at them. 

“You think the Nazis had their lives ruined?” The boy asks, pursing his lips. “How can you even justify that?” 

“I don’t mean it like that - the Delphini trials were a witch hunt. They’re destroying the lives of normal, real people, not heinous war criminals.” _Mine, me, it’s ruining me._ She’s finding it harder and harder to get by, not being able to call Arthur or Eames when she allows herself to admit that she needs people to talk to from time to time.

“No, dream tech was the cause of the destruction,” the boy says, and Phillipa suddenly wants their professor to intervene, but no, she’s letting this argument happen. They’re going to be lawyers, they have to know how to argue. “Do you know what those people did to my mother?”

“No,” Phillipa says, and he turns around in his chair even further. She quickly looks back down at her doodles. 

“They _broke_ her. They reduced her to nothing, kidnapped her, drugged her, made her forget a year of her life. She couldn’t have raised a finger even if she wanted to. Isn’t that the correct definition of being helpless? _That’s_ what those people do.” 

Those people weren’t her people, Phillipa’s people never broke anyone, except for –

“They killed my mother,” Phillipa says, and again, she can’t stop it. _Shut up shut up shut up_ \- “I mean, my father did.” Why does she keep bringing this up? She’s a broken record, last week no one she went to school with even knew that Mal was dead. 

There’s silence. Phillipa looks up, and everyone is looking at her. 

“That’s the thing about the technology,” Phillipa says, and she rubs at her forehead, and then sits up straighter. Her heart is pounding suddenly. “It killed people. It killed a lot of people, but only people in the profession. My mother actually died as a direct result of dream sharing. My father’s basically been declared criminally insane. Try to reason that for a second – a well educated, sane man who’s been told he’s fundamentally broken because people view him as evil. But it keeps him safe. And the people who raised me – they –“ she stops for a moment ( _Arthur Arthur Arthur_ ) and takes a breath, trying to stop her heart from beating so hard, so fast. “They’re probably going to die. No one ever died, none of these people ever killed their marks. But now they’re going to end up dead. Understand that. There’s no way to.”

“You are so profoundly wrong,” the boy says. “Being dead would be better than losing the last year of your life that your husband was alive. It’s absolutely fair in the shadow of what they did.” 

Phillipa gets up and leaves, and the professor doesn’t stop her. 

\---

Phillipa understand on a purely logical level that mind crime is the lowest of the low, that it’s invading a person’s most intimate thoughts and destroying things, killing things, or putting something there that’s so alien and so false that there’s no hope of getting away from it. 

Phillipa does not understand on an emotional level. This is her father, this is Arthur and Eames, these are people she grew up with. 

She cries that night for the first time in years, and her roommate finds her bent over the sink, dry heaving because she hasn’t eaten all day. 

\---

_Dominic Cobb – involuntary commitment._

_Ariadne Dennis – 20 years imprisonment._

________ Eames – missing, presumed dead, trial was never held._

_Arthur Gordon – death penalty._

\---

(After the sentences are read, there is rioting all over the globe, some for a harsher punishment, some for less, and Phillipa swears she sees Eames in a picture from Paris, standing in the distance on the roof of a burning car.)

\---

Phillipa carries her father’s old totem, the spinning top, with her no matter what. It’s a quite weight in her pocket or purse, and she’s had it for years at this point. 

After Arthur had died ( _sentence carried out by lethal injection October 30th 2025, time of death 7:32_ ) she’d received a single legal document and a red die. One is a death certificate, one is, she realizes after a few months, Arthur’s totem. For years after Arthur’s death she had tried to rationalize it, both the death and his totem, but there was no way to. The bottom line was that Arthur had pulled over two dozen jobs in his career, including two inceptions, and as the point man, the forefront, the poster child, he’d shouldered the brunt of it. There were five others who had received the same sentence. Arthur had been the first. 

The totem always rolls to 4. Eventually she gets it – a loaded die, it’s from Eames. Eames had given Arthur his totem. 

She makes sure her dress for graduation has pockets so that she can carry the top and the die. The first time she’d graduated, from undergrad, she hasn’t thought about it, and she’d felt odd without them. This time though she keeps them with her, and she shoves her hands in her pockets on the way home, keeping her fingers wrapped around each one. 

They get home to find Eames smoking under a tree in the front yard of the little house that she and Roger rent, sitting on the stone bench there, his head propped up in one hand. 

She hasn’t seen Eames in years. She stops without thinking and Roger bumps into her back. He’d been the only one there for Phillipa at graduation, James is, once again, AWOL in Europe destroying his life.

“What’s up?” Roger asks, staring at Phillipa, and she wants to snap at him suddenly _why are you looking at me you should be looking at him-_

“Nothing.” She goes to Eames, leaving Roger confused behind her. 

“You look lovely,” Eames says when he looks up, smiling simply. He looks mostly the same, although he’s going quite grey. She watches Roger go inside, somehow knowing that this isn’t about him. 

“Thanks,” Phillipa says, because she can’t think of anything to say. She has one moment of wondering if she should give him the die, but no, that’s her’s. Arthur gave it to her. She fidgets, and so does Eames, until she finally sits down next to him. 

“You’ll get your dress dirty,” Eames says. The bench does have a nice layer of dirt covering it. 

“I don’t give a fuck,” Phillipa says. “You know, you’re the only one I never defended.” 

Eames can’t know what she’s talking about, and he doesn’t say anything. 

“I even defended Dom, but not you.”

“Don’t think I’m worthy of it, anyway,” Eames says quietly, and then, “you got the die alright?” 

“Yeah,” Phillipa says, and watches a car go by. 

“Good,” Eames says, and then digs in his own pocket, producing a poker chip. “I thought about giving this one to you too.” 

“It’s fine.” 

“You’ll get it someday.” 

Phillipa decides not to think about that, and stands up, brushing dirt from her dress. Eames was right, but so was she. She can’t be bothered to care. 

“Congratulations,” he says quietly.

“Thanks,” she answers, and starts to walk away. 

“What are you doing with yourself?” Eames calls after her suddenly, when she’s almost to the door, and she hesitates, her hand on the knob. She’s gotten offers from law firms. She’s gotten offers to teach. She’s thought about getting a PhD, she’s thought about traveling. 

She thinks about all the times she and Roger and friends have gone under. She thinks about what they’ve done to people. Even in undergrad, when the marks were made up, but it’s been getting more and more real every year. Thinks about how she researches, gathers, watches, and more than anything, _knows_. It’s her business to know. 

“I’m taking over for Arthur,” she says finally, and doesn’t look back, closing the door behind her. 

\---

At the end of the summer they pack up, reduce their lives to a few bags, and turn off the lights in the house for the last time. It’s August, and it’s humid. 

The last thing she does, as Roger is waiting for her at the door, is spin the little toy top on the kitchen table and leave it like that, whirring around and around on the polished wood surface.


End file.
